It's all about brand-new car

Sunday

Feb 17, 2013 at 12:01 AMFeb 17, 2013 at 12:58 PM

CHARLOTTE, N.C.- There's a buzz about NASCAR and the season-opening Daytona 500 that has nothing to do with an exploding jet dryer or a well-timed tweet from a driver. The new Gen-6 race car makes its long-awaited debut at Daytona International Speedway, and the success of the 2013 season could depend heavily on its performance.

CHARLOTTE, N.C.— There’s a buzz about NASCAR and the season-opening Daytona 500 that has nothing to do with an exploding jet dryer or a well-timed tweet from a driver.

The new Gen-6 race car makes its long-awaited debut at Daytona International Speedway, and the success of the 2013 season could depend heavily on its performance. Already, things look good. After all, NASCAR’s most popular driver has given the new car a ringing endorsement.

“This sport is going to be revolutionized again with this car,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. said after one of his first full test sessions in the car.

That would be the shot in the arm NASCAR is looking for after a 2012 season in which the racing was criticized at times. Long green-flag runs and a lack of cautions frustrated fans, and that irritated drivers who openly wondered whether fans were more interested in wrecks than racing.

Behind the scenes, NASCAR was working on a new car that would improve the on-track product. It was welcome news to Earnhardt, who won only twice in the Car of Tomorrow.

The car seemed to boost interest in Speedweeks, which last year were remembered most for Juan Pablo Montoya’s crash into a jet dryer and Brad Keselowski’s tweets about it.

The fireball put the Daytona 500 into the mainstream spotlight, but the racing that followed failed to entertain a wider audience.

Keselowski was thrust onto the national stage with his well-timed tweets and rode the wave all the way to his first Sprint Cup title. The win over five-time champion Jimmie Johnson was a breakthrough for Keselowski, who grabbed team owner Roger Penske his first title.

Now everyone gets to see what Keselowski will do for an encore. NASCAR has forbidden him from using his phone in his car, and he’ll be hard-pressed to outdo his beer-chugging live TV interview minutes after clinching the championship.

Even harder will be defending his title. Penske Racing left Dodge at the end of the year and goes into this season as a Ford team. Penske is no longer building its own engines, and will now get them from Roush Yates as a customer of Ford’s flagship team.

“The move has gone very well so far,” said Penske President Tim Cindric. “It’s been a lot of work, but the relationship with Roush — I believe they’d say the same thing — is working well on both sides and we’ve got a lot of reason to believe we’ll have a very good year.”

Keselowski will have a new teammate in Joey Logano, who was replaced at Joe Gibbs Racing by Matt Kenseth in the biggest driver move of the year. Kenseth left Roush Fenway Racing, where he’d spent his entire career, to join Gibbs and its volatile driver lineup of Kyle Busch and Denny Hamlin.

Hamlin was a title contender through the halfway point of the 10-race Chase for the Sprint Cup title, but he stumbled at Martinsville with a mechanical failure and never recovered. Busch missed the Chase and declared 2012 “the absolute worst year of my career.”

If Stenhouse wasn’t under enough pressure as the replacement for the 2003 Cup champion, he’ll be under tremendous scrutiny this season as the other half of NASCAR’s current “it” couple. Danica Patrick, who is moving to a full Cup schedule this year, said last month that she’s dating Stenhouse.

The two will be racing each other for rookie of the year, but insist their relationship won’t affect how they race each other.

“I always say I’ll race people how they race me until they do something to make me change my mind,” she said. “I don’t anticipate ... us having any issues on the track.”

The Roush organization will also receive attention as fans watch to see whether Carl Edwards can rebound from last year’s slump. After losing the championship to Tony Stewart on a tie-breaker, Edwards went through a winless 2012 season and failed to make the Chase.

And four-time champion Jeff Gordon will be starting fresh. He intentionally wrecked Clint Bowyer in Phoenix, triggering a garage-area melee. While many thought Gordon should have been suspended, he was fined $100,000 and raced in the season finale, which he won.

The tension lingered into the offseason.

“Listen, I’m not here to make friends,” Gordon said. “I like his friendship. It can stay this way. But we have to race each other. I know what this all came about from and he might not agree and I’m sure we’re going to disagree about a lot of things and we’ll go race … and see what happens.”